


Standing Next To Me

by FinalSilhouetteMuppet (orphan_account)



Category: Last Shadow Puppets
Genre: Angst, M/M, Miles' perspective, Narrator addresses Miles, POV Second Person, not really obvious without context
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:04:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/FinalSilhouetteMuppet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slightly abstract drabble written after watching a live performance of 'Standing Next To Me'. Complete speculation over what Miles might have been thinking around the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Standing Next To Me

You’re on the stage with a beautiful man with eyes that know too much and hands that know too little. Music drops like fallen leaves caught up in a hurricane and you drink it in through your thirsty skin because that is the only way you remember how. You close your eyes while he sings and you remember. You remember a worn burgundy rug and a picture in a wooden frame of you and your mum and your dad at the seaside, and you feel safe. That’s what it is. He sings and you feel safe. 

You are writing furiously together, scribbling out sketches of things that will never come to be, and you watch his hands move across the page carving notes into the paper. His hand brushes yours and the words transfer, etching themselves in weeping ink across your hidden stretches of skin. Two years have gone but you can’t relate because the games he played were never with you, at least you think you know that they were never for you but for her, and her, and the millions of ‘hers’ that he wrote for while you dreamt that just one among the many might just be for you, and you alone. 

You, who have made him smile more than most, know that he does not smile for you alone but for her, at least the memory of her. But you can do nothing else so you keep on laughing and laughing until your lungs ache and your voice tears because maybe then he will look at you and make you smile until your heaving chest stills and your lips are pink with more than just mirth. 

You can do nothing but look as he dances on stage, your ribs pounding in sync to the beat you play as he sidles up close and wraps himself into you. Your love is standing next to me, is standing next to me, is standing next to me, but it is not you he dances for but for the hundreds, no, thousands of watchful eyes, drinking in your attention and mouthing your words with knowing smiles. You are lost in the eternity of his dry palms and hot breath as he brushes a butterfly kiss on your cheek. Your own palms are anxious rivers. You cup your hand over the kiss to catch it, savour it, to keep it. It stings. You press the kiss into your shirt pocket as you take the final bows with him, clutching his warm dry hand with your kiss-singed palm and all the thunderous yells cannot drown out the thumping heartbeat screaming through your lost and heavy brain.


End file.
